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Chocolate Chip Cookies

Everyone has their own go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe – either it’s from the back of the chocolate chip package, ailment Martha Stewart or it’s just a tube of Pillsbury cookie dough (if this is you, please continue reading to see how easy it is to make chocolate chip cookies and how truly offensively you have been living your life). My go-to is Betty Crocker’s Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe.

I love and use this recipe for a couple of reasons:

1. Betty Crocker does not lie – she says this recipe makes 4 dozen cookies and it does.

2. When I was a kid, I used to bake all the time with my sister Amelia and we would use this recipe. We have baked so many chocolate chip cookies using this recipe that the page in the recipe book is coated with enough dough to make another cookie.

3. It makes tender, moist cookies that melt in your mouth instead of crunchy, crumbly cookies that make a mess everywhere. In my edition of the Betty Crocker cookbook there is a diagram that illustrates what you did wrong if you cookies pancake out (too soft butter), or stay firm and perfectly shaped balls that you scooped out onto the cookie tray (too much flour).

On the note of softened butter – My favourite thing about my new (to me) kitchen is my refrigerator. It is from the 1970s and is a lovely olive green/yellow colour with wood veneer handles. Although almost everything is wrong with this thing, it has one piece of genius – the butter compartment has a temperature/hardness control on the outside allowing you to thaw butter in the fridge! This means, because I have this handy dial set to soft, I can literally bake whenever I want and can avoid the moment that almost always accompanied a new baking project: “I forgot to thaw my butter…”

4. If you don’t have a stand mixer (like me currently….hint, hint) you can easily make cookies using an electric hand mixer. I find it is actually better at beating the butter and mixing a smooth, liquid base before you add in your dry ingredients. It is slightly more difficult, however, to gradually add your dry ingredients and not to end up covered in flour when you use a hand mixer. I opted to stir in my dry ingredients using a spatula-spoon type utensil. Mix in all your dry ingredients before you mix in your chocolate chips.

5. The recipe calls for semi-sweet chocolate chips to be used but in my infinite wisdom, I combined all the various chocolate chips I had into one bag. This resulted in a mixture of white chocolate, semi-sweet chocolate, milk chocolate and mini chocolate chips being used in this batch. It created a nice subtle scale of chocolate flavours and colours.

6. Leave them in until they look almost cooked – this is Betty’s advice, and now my standard cookie rule. It is a common, rookie cookie move to leave cookies in the oven until the tops are hard. This will result in a rock solid cookie in your mouth.

I enjoyed a few of these at work and I left them sitting out on my desk in the sun. The chocolate chips were warm, and gooey as if straight out of the oven. Yum.

I also enjoyed a few with my friend Cynthia on our common lunch hour in Yorkville.